Life After Being Laid Off: Finding Myself in Uncertainty

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You're getting your coffee ready, logging into your laptop and then you see it. The dreaded 15 minute calendar invite that was NOT there yesterday. This was my reality in August. While I knew layoffs would eventually hit me, it is still a shock to the system. You can never truly ever be prepared. 

The Emotional Rollercoaster

In my case, I knew they were cutting our whole department, so I knew “the why”, but in the past, I have not been as lucky. The “what ifs” hit you and you start playing over everything you could have done differently in your head. Once you wrap your head around it, you start applying to every job that you see. Thus begins the other side of a layoff emotional rollercoaster; interviews. The constant rejection feels worse than the initial layoff itself. It's like you traded work burnout for interview burnout. It was at this point in my journey that I realized I needed to step back and take a pause. 

Embrace the Pause

Trading one type of burnout for another is not healthy. In fact, I would say I was in a worse mental place than when I was working. When I finally took a step back and took a breath, I realized there was so much to my life that I had put on pause while working on full steam ahead. I started allowing myself to have slow mornings, gym and walks whenever I wanted throughout the day, I started reading again, for pleasure (hello fairy smut). Doing things I enjoyed rolled into me being like, hey, I used to be creative and I hadn't played music, written or designed anything in ages. Of course, during this time my husband and I were in the middle of a home renovation, and that design work had been my saving grace while working. The lightbulb clicked. 

Career Reinvention: Out with the Old, in with the New

Isn't there an old saying about insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Thats how interviewing in this market was feeling. Final round, rejection. Final round, rejection. Rinse, repeat. I decided to take a step back from it all, and ask myself, what do I really want? This is not to say that I wouldn't accept a job back in my industry, but I needed to find what made me happy. What I like to do, so that when I was ready to re-enter the workforce, my whole identity was not tied into my job. I like helping people, I like design, I like creating things. So I took the time to focus on that. Starting this blog, taking digital marketing classes to learn more about the social media world so that I could create meaningful content that could help people. Taking Real Estate classes to expand my career beyond technology. Giving myself options and different ways to find purpose in my life. 

Building a New Daily Routine 

The absolute biggest struggle for me post layoff was finding a new routine. We don't realize how tied our daily routine is to our job. Take the job away and its like whoa, how do I structure my day? What do I do with myself? What worked as a daily routine when I was working full time at a corporate job, did not fit into my new lifestyle. There was a lot of trial and error. I found the best thing for me was to schedule out my days (similar to when I worked). Make a “to-do” list, even if that list is laundry, going to the gym, applying for jobs, taking a marketing class. I also realized that just because I went to the gym at 6 pm when I had my corporate job, didnt mean that was the best time in my new reality. And that was ok. Accepting I could move my day around to fit ME, was huge. Recently, I’ve noticed that I have been much busier than I ever was with my corporate job. It feels good to be busy, it feels good to have structure and it feels good to have purpose. 

This is my favorite planner Ive ever gotten. 

Available on Amazon 

Rewriting the Narrative and Moving Forward with Purpose

I really struggled from August to about November. Trying to force things to happen and forgetting to take care of myself mentally and physically. Once I was able to see this layoff as a positive, a way to find myself again, was I able to rewrite the narrative of my life. I am happy, I feel like I am working towards my purpose in life. I'm not burned out, I am at peace. I am at the point where I could go back to the workforce and have an actual work/life balance. Before I thought that meant balancing work and my social life. But no, it's balancing work and what makes you happy.